Mekton : Mecha as Costumes

For many years after it's introduction, I just couldn't talk to Battletech fans. As an anime fan I saw the game itself as offensive, and fans of the game as incredibly naive, chauvanistic*, and stupid. That was in my adolescence, and as I got older attitude gradually softened to just naive and chauvanistic, then just naive, and eventually I realized that what it really boiled down to was that they saw giant robots in a perspective drastically different from mine, and the only thing I could really criticize Battletech fans for would be a stubborn inability to see things in a different way, the same kind of stubborness I had for years.

*In this case, a Westerner's dismissial of Japanese ideas.

Basically, many Americans (and the British, and other Westerners), tend to look at giant robots in anime as advanced, if implausible military vehicles. That is certainly one aspect of mecha, and one not at all ignored by Japanese publishers, but it really is a superficial aspect of giant robots as they appear in Japanese pop culture. Early Japanese giant robot characters like Giant Robo and Tetsujin 28 (Gigantor) were created for "boy and his dog" stories, where the superhero robot was the loyal companion of a young boy who really had no business fighting crime, but spent most his time doing so. Then in 1972 anime/manga icon Go Nagai* introduced Mazinger Z, a giant robot that could be operated by a pilot protected inside the robot's armored body (in the case of Mazinger, the head). When Mobile Suit Gundam made it's debut in 79, it crossed the devide from supehero adventure to science-fiction by introducing a super robot (Gundam) as the pinnacle of futurisitic military technology (mass-produced Mobile Suits). The popularity of Gundam models (the series had poor ratings) led to real robots dominating giant robot anime of the 80s, reinforcing the idea of mecha controlled by pilots sitting inside the robots.

*It's kind of difficult to explain Go Nagai's significance to anime and manga, not to mention my admiration for him, without both overstatement and understatement. The most succinct thing I can say is that he's much like american superhero artist/writer Jack Kirby in that Nagai invigorated his chosen mediums with wild imagination, serious artistic thought, and visceral action/adventure characters and stories.

Since then the piloted giant robot has become the default approach to mecha anime & manga, and it's not a coincidence that these piloted robots were usually humanoid. Japan has several traditional forms of theater with elaborate costumes, and banraku troupes feature onstage pupeteers almost wear shophisticated puppets ranging from about 3 feet high to almost-life-sized. Costumes are also very prominent in theater-inspired live action scifi* called tokusatsu. To put it simply, anime and manga allow mecha to be the ultimate costumes, allowing perfectly normal people to become any kind of action hero or superhero and still be able to go back to thier normal lives when the fight is over.